"There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can't know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you've reached it. I believe this."
— Alice Munro

"Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly."
— Alice Munro (The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose)

"Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?"
— Alice Munro

"People are curious. A few people are. ... They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.

(from "Meneseteung")"
— Alice Munro (Friend of My Youth)

"Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again. "
— Alice Munro (Away from Her)

"Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind."
— Alice Munro

"There were people whom you positively ached to please. If you failed with such people they would put you into a category in their minds where they could kee you and have contempt for you forever."
— Alice Munro

"The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming."
— Alice Munro (Runaway: Stories)

"This is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don't think about it at all.

The thing that was your bright treasure. You don't think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember.

This is what happens.

...

Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you."
— Alice Munro (Runaway: Stories)

"He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life. "
— Alice Munro (Away from Her)

"And did I not think then, What nonsense it is to suppose one man so different from another when all that life really boils down to is getting a decent cup of coffee and room to stretch out in?"
— Alice Munro

"You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations."
— Alice Munro (Open Secrets: Stories)

"I sit watching the brown oceanic waves of dry country rising into the foothills and I weep monotonously, seasickly. Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else."
— Alice Munro

"I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.
"
— Alice Munro

"A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.
"
— Alice Munro

"Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later."
— Alice Munro

"This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you've been driving for a long time -- you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of you being there to see them."
— Alice Munro (The Progress of Love)

"If I decided to send this to you, where would I send it? When I think of writing the whole address on the envelope I am paralyzed. It's too painful to think of you in the same place with your life going on in the same way, minus me. And to think of you not there, you somewhere else but I don't know where that is, is worse."
— Alice Munro (The Love of a Good Woman : Stories)

"When I told him on the phone that after all you and I would not be getting married, he said "Oh-oh. Do you think you'll ever manage to get another one?" If I'd objected to his saying that he would naturally have said it was a joke. And it was a joke. I have not managed to get another one but perhaps have not been in the best condition to try."
— Alice Munro

"What if people really did that - sent their love through the mail to get rid of it? What would it be that they sent? A box of chocolates with centers like the yolks of turkey eggs. A mud doll with hollow eye sockets. A heap of roses slightly more fragrant than rotten. A package wrapped in bloody newspaper that nobody would want to open."
— Alice Munro (The Love of a Good Woman : Stories)

"What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given."
— Alice Munro

"the conversation of kisses. subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming."
— Alice Munro (Runaway: Stories)

"I used to feel for years and years and years that I was very remiss not to have written a novel and I would question people who wrote novels and try to find out how they did it and how they had got past page 30. Then, with the approach of old age, I began to just think: “Well, lucky I can do anything at all."
"
— Alice Munro

"For we did makeup. But we didn't forgive each other. And we didn't take steps. And it got to be too late and we saw that each of us had invested too much in being in the right and we walked away and it was a relief. "
— Alice Munro (The Love of a Good Woman : Stories)

"So what about me? Would I always have to find a high horse? The moral relish, the rising above, the being in the right, which can make me flaunt my losses."
— Alice Munro (The Love of a Good Woman : Stories)

"You would think that Rosemary would understand that. She should have understood what such a choice said - that Karin was not to be made happy, amends were not possible, forgiveness was out of the question. "
— Alice Munro (The Love of a Good Woman : Stories)

"I would have a flick of fear, as in a dream when you find yourself in the wrong building or have forgotten the time for the exam and understand that this is only the tip of some shadowy cataclysm or lifelong mistake. "
— Alice Munro (The Love of a Good Woman : Stories)

"There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done."
— Alice Munro (The Love of a Good Woman : Stories)

"I despised their antics because I took life seriously and had a much more lofty and tender notion of romance. But I would have liked to get their attention just the same. "
— Alice Munro (The Love of a Good Woman : Stories)

"He loved her for her wit, her cynicism, her deceptions. Less than lovable these seem to me now. They are both sly, Hugh and Margaret, they are socially awkward, easily embarrassed. But cold underneath, you may be sure, colder than us easy flirts with our charms and conquests. They do not reveal themselves. They will never admit to anything, never have to talk about anything, no, I could claw their skin and it would be my own fingers that would bleed. I could scream at them till my throat bursts and never alter their self-possession, change the look of their sly averted faces. Both blond, both easy blushers, both cold mockers. They have contempt for me. That is rubbish of course. Nothing for me. All for each other. Love."
— Alice Munro

"In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places."
— Alice Munro (Too Much Happiness)